LOS ANGELES, MON AMOUR

Saint Laurent's Anthony Vaccarello has long had an affinity for LA's cinematic way of life. Now he's extending his creativity beyond fashion as worn by his friend Gwyneth Paltrow to make the kind of movies he loves.

- Rob Haskell

GO WEST Vaccarello at home in Brentwood. "We have a quality of life here that we don't have in Paris, and it's so different that I find that I need it." Sittings Editor: Yohana Lebasi.

If you were a child of the '90s, you didn't dream about Yves Saint Laurent. By then, the preeminent fashion genius of the third quarter of the 20th century and the designer so often credited with inventing the modern woman's wardrobe had handed prêt-à-porter over to his assistants, who clung as if by commandment to the house dogma of bourgeois Parisian elegance. For a child of the '90s, newer thrills abounded: the minimalism of Helmut Lang and the grunge of (early) Marc Jacobs, the full-blooded glamour of Versace, the humor and irreverence of Jean Paul Gaultier, the deconstructed shapes of Yohji Yamamoto.

Then again, Anthony Vaccarello was not the sort of future designer who had pages from Vogue Italia pasted to his bedroom walls as a teenager, though maybe he doodled a high-heel shoe or two in his notebook during math class. For him, music and its MTV-fueled visual culture provided the inroad into fashion: Björk in "Violently Happy," and above all, Madonna in Gaultier's eternal pink Blond Ambition cone bra.

"To be honest, when I was a student, Yves Saint Laurent was never someone I looked at," says Vaccarello, who marks a decade at the helm of Saint Laurent next year. "He was already a bit old for me, more linked at the end to the perfume, to that woman—very elegant, very sophisticated—that he always did. But the same clients were very loyal to him, and he never gave up on those amazing women, a bit hors du temps. I really love that, and I'm more attracted now to the '90s moment when he was into that perfect woman. I like the idea of taking that DNA and putting it on a woman today—taking a flower and putting it in a jersey yoga look, for example, for someone you might come across at Erewhon."